ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters we have established the following propositions. First of all, that the object of all secondary education is to arouse and develop a capacity for thinking without trying to tie it down to any one particular vocation; it follows therefore that the whole concept of a secondary education system designed to give only a specialised training for particular jobs, say in commerce or industry, is radically incoherent. Having made this conceptual point, we at once added that it is impossible to exercise a capacity for thinking in the void: it has to be directed towards particular objects of thought. The only way of developing the capacity for thought is to present the mind with particular things to think about, to teach it how to come to understand them, to approach them from the direction in which they may most easily be grasped, to demonstrate to it how best it can tackle them in order to arrive at clear and distinct conclusions. Thus when I say that we must cultivate the capacity for thought, I certainly don’t mean that we have to submit the mind to some vacuous, because purely formal, culture; what we need is to discover those elements of reality upon which the mind ought to be exercised, for it is these elements of reality which must determine its development. The object of cultivating the mind can only consist in the acquisition of a certain number of intellectual habits and attitudes, which enable the mind to form adequate conceptions of the most important kinds of things. The habits are necessarily a function of the kinds of thing with which the mind is dealing, and they differ when different kinds of thing are involved. Thus the supreme problem in educational theory is that of knowing towards what kinds of thing the public thinking should be directed. And this, of course, is to ask a question very far removed from the formalism which has dominated and continues to dominate secondary education.
